What Can a Virtual Marketing Assistant Do for You? - Get more referrals by talking to us!

{4:20 minutes to read} Relationships take time, but one of the things you can do to help offset that is to use a virtual marketing assistant.

In the early days of Practice Marketing, long before phoneBlogger came into play, Vik and I would sit with professional services clients – attorneys, CPAs, financial advisors, etc. – and advise them on what they should and could be doing to market their practices. One of the questions that always came up was, “Who’s going to do the actual work?”

When it came to online marketing, article writing and newsletters, we created the phoneBlogger service to be able to – as much as possible – do it for them, but there were a lot of other things they needed to be doing.

One is reaching out to those who can potentially refer you business – to introduce yourself, get to know them, and let them get to know you. There’s usually quite a bit of time that can be consumed in finding them, looking them up online, sending them emails and letters and adding them to your mailing list, etc.

Virtual assistants help track people down. Recently we had a client that realized there was a group of people within a specific industry that was their best possible COIs (Centers of Influence) locally. It became obvious there was going to be some tedium in getting all of their names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, etc. gathered up and put into some place where they could be managed. In this particular case, we decided it was best to use a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) to gather up online resources and organize the information. They didn’t know what a CRM was or how to find one. (We’ll discuss CRMs and how to use them for marketing in an upcoming post.)

The client was busy and didn’t have time to do the legwork required to get started with this, so we helped them find a virtual assistant who had experience with a CRM. They were set up and before we knew it, they had hundreds of potential COIs in a database.

We used the virtual assistant again to help create activities and introductory emails, for all the things that can be time-consuming and not so easy for someone who’s busy, and in professional services. Everything’s done very easy with a virtual assistant.

Assigning tedious tasks out to a virtual assistant will certainly save you time and will allow you to focus on your core business. Examples include:

Manage your schedule
Invite people to connect or go out for a cup of coffee
Schedule a larger meeting or conference call with multiple people
Coordinate with somebody who’s hard to reach
10 Things to Outsource to a Virtual Assistant (Entrepreneur Magazine)

You could also use a virtual assistant to check on the status of something, such as a permit or an application with an agency or the government, especially when you know you’re going to be on hold for 35 minutes.

With some guidance and direction as to what you are trying to do and how you’re trying to do it, a virtual assistant can take the ball and roll with it. From sending emails on your behalf to setting up auto-responses or handling replies and notifying you when you’ve got somebody interested in sitting down for a meeting, a virtual assistant can help.

Use Elance, Fancy Hands, Zirtual, or any other number of virtual assistant resources to find help for your business today.